Promoting Higher Level of Knowledge Building Outcome: Design Issues

Abstract

The design of learning activities has been a major research in education. When the focus of education moves from learning to knowledge building, what are the factors that affect the depth of knowledge building that students could reach? Theoretically, the depth of engagement of the students and the kind of facilitation/ scaffolding that teacher could provide are key factors. Could certain kinds of task design facilitate deeper engagement? As students are generally working in groups, do groups need facilitation in helping them develop into autonomous knowledge building team? Do team leaders matter? Would team leaders with specific training/ exercise contribute to deeper levels of knowledge building of the team? Would students’ length of experience/ length of time for task engagement help them to get to deeper levels of knowledge building? In this paper, our research team reflects on the above questions through an analysis of the knowledge building outcome of students engage in various setting and task design.